


Brilliance

by DT Maxwell (Draya)



Series: Our Blades Are Sharp [18]
Category: Star Wars: The Old Republic
Genre: Adopted Children, F/M, Father-Daughter Relationship, Fluff, Life day, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Renatus Family Feels, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-06
Updated: 2014-06-06
Packaged: 2018-02-03 14:11:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1747472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Draya/pseuds/DT%20Maxwell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's their first Life Day with Xalla as a member of the family, and Tryphaena Renatus has made damn sure it's perfect for her little girl.</p><p>Her little girl manages to pull the wool over her eyes, anyway. (She's so proud.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Brilliance

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to my [tumblr](http://dragons-bones.tumblr.com/post/71010182703/swtor-brilliance) in December 2013.
> 
> ALL THE RENATUS FAMILY FEELS DAMNIT ALL.

It was Xalla’s first Life Day as a Renatus, and Phae’s initial thought had been to _buy all the things._

She had refrained, however, because as much as she would love to spoil her daughter rotten, Xalla was still adjusting to no longer being a slave, and receiving so many brightly-wrapped presents would probably have sent her into shock.

(Phae still remembered when she’d received her first weekly apprentice’s stipend after passing her trials. The other apprentices – ones from the old Sith and aristocratic families on Dromund Kaas and Dromund Fels and Ziost and other Sith-held worlds – frequently complained about how stingy their masters could be, but Phae had spent the first eleven years of her life as a gutter rat on Nar Shaddaa and the next ten or eleven as a slave. Her hands had shaken so badly holding that credit chit, it had taken five tries before she could finally insert it into the banking kiosk and deposit the stipend into her new savings account.

That first stipend could have kept her and her sisters fed for a _month._ )

Phae did, however, shell out the credits for a real wroshyr tree from Kashyyk for the Life Day tree. (Ah, the joys of having an ex-smuggler for a sister and a pirate for a husband.) No sense in being stingy elsewhere during the holidays, and having the tree delivered to their penthouse apartment in Kaas City served as both a neat little “fuck you” to whichever idiot in Imperial Command thought Edict GR-1NC4 was a good idea, and a blatant display of her power and authority as Darth Makhaira to _flaunt_ such an edict. She and Xalla spent most of an afternoon decorating the wroshyr tree with red blown-glass baubles, dangling strings of soft white lights, and glittering silver tinsel. Though, most of the tinsel had ended up all over the penthouse’s living room during a tinsel-fight.

(Andronikos had gotten home just in time to take a holo of them. Phae had been sitting cross-legged on the floor, her dark honey hair out of its usual tail, grinning so wide her cheeks had ached, keeping a squirming Xalla pinned gently in her lap and tickling their daughter’s sides mercilessly while Xalla had shrieked and flailed with laughter. Both of them – and most of the living room – had been covered in tinsel, and Xalla had lost one of her snowflake-patterned socks sometime during the melee.)

Now it was Life Day morning, and Xalla pounced on her parents’ bed. Phae groaned and buried her head back in her pillow, her whining request of, “Five more minutes, pleeeeeeeease,” coming out muffled. She heard Andronikos laugh and say to Xalla, “Go on ahead, kiddo, I’ll get your mom up.” There was a pause – probably Xalla giving her father a hug – and then a soft thud as Xalla rolled off the bed, and the quick-moving footsteps of a little girl zipping out to the living room.

Andronikos poked her side. “Tryphaena.”

“Mmph.”

“Phae.”

“Mmmmph.”

“Get up.”

Phae held up her hand. Her fingers were curled into a fist, except for the middle one.

“Cute, sweetheart, real cute.”

Phae dropped her hand back to the mattress and grumbled.

“Aren’t you normally supposed to be the morning person in the family?” Andronikos said wryly. Phae heard him stand up and move around to her side of the bed.

The Sith didn’t even have time to yelp as her husband wrapped his arm around her waist and hauled her up, tossing her (and the blanket tangled around her) over his shoulder. Rather than fight, she instead made a disgusted noise and let her arms dangle down Andronikos’s back. Andronikos hitched her up further on his shoulder, laughed at her curse, and walked out of the bedroom.

Phae groaned again. “I don’t wanna be awake,” she slurred.

“Tough luck, babe, no one gets to sleep in on Life Day,” her husband said.

Phae attempted to knee him in his side, but Andronikos was faster and grabbed her leg to hold it still. He couldn’t, however, do anything to stop her from digging her fingers into his ass and _pinching._ Phae cackled at his indignant yelp.

Xalla poked her head over the edge of the couch as her parents came in, eyeing them suspiciously. Andronikos dumped his wife in a heap on the other end of the couch and headed to the kitchen to get her a cup of caf. Phae kicked herself free of the blanket, resettled herself to sit cross-legged, and opened her arms wide. Xalla dove into the proffered hug, twisting to face the Life Day tree and the small stacks of presents clustered at its base, and snuggled back into her mother. Phae hummed, arms wrapped comfortably around her little girl and resting her chin on her daughter’s head.

“You are far too chirpy for-“ Phae paused and glanced over to the chrono on the wall. “-0630 in the morning.” She wrinkled her nose. “Ugh, gross.”

“But Momma! _Presents._ ”

She sighed and raised a hand to tap one of the tiny bone spurs on Xalla’s chin. Xalla giggled. “Yes, yes, presents,” she said, not bothering to cover a yawn. “Those are fun. I’ll like them more when I have caf.”

“Whoever controls the caf controls the universe.”

Phae blinked, frowned, and pulled back to stare down at her daughter. Xalla tilted her head up and blinked huge golden eyes, face pulled into Innocent Expression #5: I Learned It From Aunt Dea.

“Your Aunt Dea is _not allowed_ to teach you how to overthrow a hutt regime until you’re of age, and I’m going to be having Words with her about that,” Phae said.

“Awwwwwww.”

“No.”

“Listen to your mom, kiddo,” Andronikos said, walking back into the living room with two cups of caf and one of hot cocoa carefully gripped in his hands. He set the mugs down on the low table in front of the couch and handed the appropriate mugs to Phae and Xalla. “She’ll do you one better, anyway, and teach you how to overthrow a darth.”

“Damn right.”

Xalla giggled into her cocoa.

Phae took two long gulps of caf – cream, no sugar – and used the Force to float it over to the table, because it was Life Day and she was allowed to be lazy. (There was also the lapful of excited, wiggling Pureblood daughter to consider. Accidental burns on Life Day were not acceptable.)

Her daughter leaned forward – Phae automatically wrapped an arm around her waist to help the little girl keep her balance – and slid her own mug onto the table. When Xalla leaned back into Phae’s lap and looked over at the tree again, however, she stilled, and seemed to shrink into herself.

Phae and Andronikos shared a look, and then Andronikos knelt down on the floor in front of the couch so his eyes were on level with their daughter’s. “Hey, kiddo. What’s wrong?” he said.

Xalla took a few moments to respond, but when she did her voice was quiet and wavering. “I’m afraid this’ll jus’ be a dream an’ I’m gonna wake up,” she said, voice cracking on the last word. Phae could hear the unspoken ‘in the slave pens’ and she made a soft noise in the back of her throat, cuddling her daughter close.

Andronikos carefully cupped their daughter’s face in his hands, brushing his thumbs over her cheeks to catch a few tears. “Xalla, sweetheart, I promise you that this isn’t a dream,” he said, voice quiet but strong. “This is your home and we’re your parents, and when you go to sleep tonight and wake up tomorrow morning, that will still be true. Okay?”

Xalla sniffed hard, and nodded. “Okay,” she said, reaching up to wipe at her eyes with the sleeve of her pajamas.

“And if anyone else says otherwise-“

“Momma will shank them,” Xalla said, a small giggle following.

Phae’s grin was wolfish. “In the kidneys,” she said. “Now, my little Xalla-love – we’ve got presents to open!” She raised an arm and made an imperious shooing motion. “Husband! Fetch.”

Xalla cheered. Andronikos kissed Xalla on the forehead and stood. “Woof,” he said, waggling his eyebrows at Phae, and sauntered over to the Life Day tree.

They spent the next few hours leisurely opening presents. Xalla neatly undid the wrapping on each of her gifts rather than tearing into it, setting the paper aside in a pile, and thoroughly examined each item as it was revealed. She had a voracious appetite for knowledge, her parents had discovered, and had picked up reading so fast they’d been hard-pressed the first month to keep up with the way she tore through datapads full of reading primers. A good chunk of her presents from family, therefore, were real books, with paper pages and leather or hardbound covers.

For every gift from her parents that she opened, Xalla gave her mother and father each a big, long hug, wrapping her arms around them tightly, standing or sitting quietly as the hug was returned, before disengaging and giving the other parent the same treatment. Gifts from Aunt Arty and Aunt Dea and Uncle Darmas and the rest of their oddball family were noted on a list Xalla began compiling on her new datapad (one of Aunt Dea’s designs) so she could properly gush to them later via holo without forgetting anything. And gifts from others (quadruple-checked by Phae and Andronikos running on full “Paranoid Parent on Dromund Kaas” mode before being grudgingly wrapped and placed beneath the tree) were similarly noted so Xalla could send out politely-worded thank you notes.

Xalla’s favorite present by far, however, was a huge book of Corellian faerie tales, lushly illustrated in vibrant colors, and specially commissioned by the whole family for their newest member. She kept going back to that book throughout the morning, reverently turning the glossy pages, quietly mouthing the words as she read along, occasionally asking her parents for help with an unfamiliar word. Andronikos and Phae, meanwhile, used her moments of distraction to organize the gifts, clean up, make breakfast, and consume more caf. Phae also used one of the lulls to brush out Xalla’s thick, dark wine-colored hair and tame it into a loose but neat four-strand braid.

The apartment was quiet once all the gifts had been unwrapped. Phae was engrossed in the technical schematics of a new speeder design (Andronikos always knew the best way to entertain her was to let her build her toys herself), lying flat on her back on the couch, legs in Andronikos’s lap. Her husband, meanwhile, was assembling a new blaster and instructing a rapt Xalla, hanging over the back of the couch, about each part and its importance.

Then the buzzer rang.

Xalla’s head shot up. The corner of Andronikos’s mouth twitched suspiciously.

Phae dropped her datapad to her stomach and said, “Who’s that supposed to be?”

Xalla was already running to the door, braid flying behind her as she chanted, “It’s here, it’s here!” Andronikos quickly disassembled his blaster and set it aside, before patting his wife’s ankle and moving her legs out of the way so he could stand up.

“Andronikos, what is going on?”

Her pirate smirked down at her. “You know how you said Kardea has a will of steel so cold she makes Hoth look warm?”

“…Yes?”

“Apparently that steel will has absolutely _nothing_ on Xalla’s puppy eyes when she has an idea that needs followin’ through.” Andronikos leaned down and dropped a kiss on her nose. “Stay here,” he said, and strolled toward the foyer, disappearing around the corner.

Phae stared after him. “What in the hell,” she said.

She could appreciate a (nice) surprise, at least, and refrained from reaching out with the Force to figure out what in nine hells her husband and daughter were up to as she sat up. So the widening of her eyes and jaw dropping in shock were completely genuine when Xalla carefully walked back into the living room, a grinning Andronikos trailing after her, with an armful of jaggalor cub.

The cub had a big red bow wrapped around its neck, and it looked old enough that it was probably recently weaned. It looked around alertly, seemingly unaffected by being carried, and gently kneaded at Xalla’s arm with its two-toed paws.

Xalla stopped before her mother and gently set down the cub in Phae’s lap. “Happy Life Day, Momma!” she said, smiling widely.

The kitten sat upright, gazing at Phae assessingly, before chirping and leaning up to rub its face against Phae’s. It started purring loudly.

Phae’s vision suddenly blurred with tears and she wiped at her eyes furiously. A glance to Andronikos showed him pointing to Xalla and mouthing, “All her idea.” She turned to face her beaming daughter and gathered her into a hug, mindful of the little jaggalor in her lap. “Thank you, Xalla,” she said, voice cracking. “You’re an incredible girl, and I’m lucky to have you in my life.”

Xalla kissed her cheek. “Love you, Momma.”

“Love you, too, daughter mine.”


End file.
